


The Writing On My Soul

by RowWithAChipNPin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), X-Men (Movies)
Genre: Canon Crossover, Crack Pairings, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, Multiple Crossovers, Not Canon Compliant, Pietro Maximoff Lives, Platonic Soulmates, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Post-Season/Series 02, Rare Pairings, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-21
Updated: 2015-10-21
Packaged: 2018-04-27 12:10:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5048050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RowWithAChipNPin/pseuds/RowWithAChipNPin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Soulmark: An identifying mark on a person's body that helps identify one's soulmate(s)</p><p>Soulmate: A person ideally suited to another as a close friend or romantic partner; a person with whom one has a feeling of deep or natural affinity</p><p>Imagine if the first words your soulmate will ever say to you are imprinted on your body. Somewhere out there is someone carrying your handwriting etched into their skin, words you haven't said yet. Perhaps those words are well thought out and deep in meaning, or perhaps it's as simple and unhelpful as "hello."</p><p> </p><p>Tags will be added as chapters are posted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Writing On My Soul

**Author's Note:**

> First: Feel free to send me pairings you’d like to see in future chapters. I do have a list, so if it’s not already on there, I’ll be sure to add it.
> 
> Second: I am not a fan of insta-love in fanfics, personally, and I usually like to show the development of a relationship. I don’t care if they’re soulmates, no one’s going to have sex with someone they literally just met. I will try to do that here, but I’m also not above blatant PWP. Be sure to check for any content warnings at the start of each chapter.
> 
> Third: I cannot promise to update regularly. I'm sorry, it's just how it is. I'm in my second year of university and my workload isn't light, as well as having other projects that I am working on. But I hope you'll bear with me, or at least enjoy what's already up.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Row

Jemma always ate her vegetables first.

There was no particular reason for it, nor did she fear something bad would happen if she didn’t. It was simply a habit left over from childhood, one Fitz found adorable and endearing for reasons beyond her comprehension.

“I don’t know why you find it so funny, Fitz,” she exclaimed, poking her fork in the air.

He shrugged, mumbling something around a mouthful of fries and ketchup. She winced.

“Oh, please chew first,” she pled. “You have truly awful manners, you know that?”

He swallowed and smiled sheepishly.

“Sorry.”

Jemma clicked her tongue against her teeth and shook her head unhappily.

“Sk—Daisy has been such an awful influence,” she bemoaned.

“I mean, I am glad for you,” she continued, piercing a mushy pea with each separate tine of the fork, “having found your soulmate, but honestly, that doesn’t mean you can’t chew with your mouth closed.”

To be perfectly fair, the dip in table manners wasn’t her only complaint regarding Fitz’ behavior as of late—a certain violation of lab health and safety involving the chemical shower came to mind—but he was so happy with Daisy, Jemma couldn’t bring herself to complain.

So what if he was a bit more absent-minded and distracted, because his mind was in the gym, and if Daisy was taking up more space in the lab out of the need to be with Fitz? That was what happened when you found your other half.

Jemma wasn’t bitter—much. At least they were happy.

She sometimes wondered if Fate got it wrong. No one in her life had even come close to saying her words, and in her loneliness, she began to consider the possibility that maybe, she was just meant to be alone. Maybe she wasn’t supposed to have a soulmate.

Anyway, she wasn’t stupid. She knew that matching soulmarks was no promise of a perfect ending. True love, soulmates—it still took effort. There was no short cut to a happily ever after.

She saw it every day when Daisy struggled to understand the complexity of Fitz’ newest contraption until she was near tears and he was ready to scream in frustration because he couldn’t find the right words to explain. When Fitz sucked it up and pretended to give a damn about Daisy’s favorite reality show, but really he was trying not to fall asleep and worse, she knew it. There were more than a few times when Jemma walked into a room to find them shouting at each other in varying degrees of incomprehensibility, and she knew she wasn’t the only one to witness their spats.

But in the end, they were happier with each other than with anyone else, and she’d at least like the chance to find the same.

What Fitz had with Daisy…Jemma desperately wanted it for herself.

An explosion rocked the diner, jarring her out of her crestfallen musings. Fitz was already on his feet, phone in his hand, when the second detonation shattered the windows and knocked them both to the ground. The explosion was loud, an unbelievable roar that assaulted her eardrums and would have driven her to her knees if the force of it hadn’t knocked her down. The floor lurched sickeningly under her, vibrating in her bones.

At first there was silence as some got back up and looked around in confusion and gradual, dawning realizations. Others, a heart wrenching minority, stayed down. The world stood still and she felt in her breast the breath of the very Earth cease.

Then someone screamed, the hush shattered like sugar glass, and it dissolved into pandemonium.

Once she could, Jemma staggered to her feet, ignoring a sharp pain her shoulder, and covered her mouth and nose with her sweater sleeve. She looked around and the concussive force must have propelled her into some sort of dissociative state, because she both registered everything and saw nothing at the same time.

Thick black smoke invaded the broken diner through the holes in the street-side wall where windows had been moments before. There was a third rumble, farther away than its predecessors, and off in the distance, red and orange roses bloomed within the murk, something she wished she didn’t recognize.

Coughing, Jemma blinked back the sting of infant tears, and shouted for Fitz. If he responded, she couldn’t hear him over the screaming, oh so much screaming.

“Fitz!” she tried again.

“Here!”

He emerged from the smoke to her left, and warm relief flooded her. He looked truly awful, with dust coating him from the head down and tiny pieces of concrete in his hair, but he didn’t seem hurt. In the moment and even in hindsight, it wasn’t clear who closed the distance or who hugged who first, but the distance between them disappeared as she clung to him.

“Oh thank God,” Jemma gasped, fingers digging into his back just as he did to her.

He pressed his nose into her hair and took a deep, shuddering breath. It wasn’t the first time they’d found themselves at the epicenter of unfortunate events, nor was it the first bomb to go off in their vicinity, but oddly, it never got any easier.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, stepping back.

They headed for the front of the store, hoping it wasn’t blocked by rubble. Jemma stayed close to Fitz as they picked their way through the rubble, clutching his sleeve tightly in her fist. He was shaking; or maybe it was her, or possibly the floor again. She didn’t really care. As they circumvented the disrupted diner, stepping over fallen furniture and chunks of rubble blown in through shattered windows, she tried her comm only to get an earful of white noise.

“Dammit,” she swore. “I can’t get through. The blast must’ve knocked out the signal.”

Fitz snorted, shaking his head in incredulity. That was what they got for relaying comms through the native New York channels left over from Fury’s S.H.I.E.L.D. rather than the Bus, parked at an airfield outside of the city.

“Figures,” he muttered.

Jemma yelped as she tripped over an uprooted table and landed on her knees, face to face with a corpse. Blood seeped into her leggings. Fitz bent to help her up and found himself with an armful of biochemist as she shrieked and leapt up; the corpse wasn’t so much corpse-like as _near_ corpse-like, and had grabbed for her with blood trickling out and one eye hanging from its socket.

“Fuck!” he exclaimed, pulling them both out of reach.

They hurried out and into smoke-clouded sunlight. As they stepped into the street and the throng of panicked people, their comms began to beep relentlessly, freed from whatever interference had jammed them.

_“—there?! Answer me, dammit!”_

Relief flooded through Jemma as Daisy’s voice erupted in her ear. She was safe. Daisy was safe.

“We’re here,” Jemma said breathlessly. “We just got out, but we’re okay.” She turned to Fitz. “Daisy’s okay.”

Fitz slumped in relief as slightly hysterical laughter came through the line, followed with faint shouting to someone—Coulson, Jemma assumed—that the resident geeks were still breathing.

 _“Oh thank fuck,”_ Daisy replied when she returned. _“The bombs went off and then we couldn’t get ahold of you, and everyone else had checked in. We were so worried.”_

They slowed and stepped off to the side, and Fitz sat down on the curb while Jemma coordinated with Daisy.

“Right,” she said, “we’ll see you soon.”

She signed off and turned back to Fitz.

“So Daisy and the others are set up at Stark Industries coordinating with the Avengers on rescue,” she explained. “They want us to meet them there to help.”

He nodded and, with some effort, got to his feet. The movement stirred the dust around them, and Fitz hacked into his hand, trying to simultaneously rid himself of the hot, rancid air burning the inside of his lungs and not tip over; Jemma realized he must’ve inhaled far more of the smoke than she had. She pushed him towards the line of ambulances just outside the safety barrier.

“Go,” she said. “I’ll go meet Daisy, you get checked out.”

He opened his mouth to object, but closed it in response to her pointed glare.

“Alright.” He hugged her tightly, and whispered in her ear, “Be safe.”

Jemma watched him go, and waited until he was beyond the yellow tape and line of officers before she turned and started off.

 

 

 

By the time she finally found her way to SI, Jemma was not in the best of moods. She was tired and sore, and the dust had somehow found its way into her knickers.

So it wasn’t surprising that she wasn’t looking where she was going, too busy trying to navigate through the makeshift hospital set up in the lobby that she didn’t notice the man in her way until she stepped down quite firmly on his foot.

She looked up to apologize and froze, eyes widening as she took in the famous features and shining start on his chest. Then she had a second, more unsettling realization that made her cheeks flush in embarrassment: She just stepped on Captain America’s foot.

“Oh my, you’re—oh, I’m terribly sorry about your foot,” she babbled, cheeks flushing. _Oh, do shut up, Jemma_ , she thought, chastising herself behind a nervous smile.

But rather than being annoyed at her discomfiture, he tipped his chin to her and smiled brilliantly.

“It’s quite alright,” he assured her. “Do you need help?”

She was confused, until she realized two things: first, she was still covered in debris and blood, and second, he just said her words.

Captain America said her words.

And now he was grinning and looking at her like she was the only girl in the whole world.

“No, no, I’m quite alright,” she said, wringing her hands. Nervous tic. Some people chew their lips, others play with their hair—Jemma found herself incapable of keeping her hands still. “I’m looking for Co—the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents here.”

She didn’t want to out Coulson as alive if the captain didn’t know and hoped saying S.H.I.E.L.D. would be enough, but apparently, it didn’t matter because realization dawned on his impossibly handsome face.

“You must be Fitzsimmons. Agent Johnson said you’d be coming.”

Despite the fact that Skye had been going by her birth name for several months, it still took Jemma several seconds to connect _Agent Johnson_ with _Skye._ She’d known the hacker-turned-Inhuman by her chosen alter ego for so long, it was taking Jemma a bit to reconcile the two names in her head. She was getting better; she’d only called Daisy ‘Skye’ twice in the last week.

But it wasn’t the first time she and Fitz had been mistaken for one person, and at least she knew how to respond to that part, so she smiled and laughed breathlessly.

“Actually, I’m just Simmons,” she corrected. “I made Fitz get checked out, so he’ll be along afterwards. He’s engineering, I’m biochem.”

Cap made a noise she took to mean _ah, well that makes sense,_ and nodded. He offered her his hand, which she took carefully. He was much larger than her physically—God bless the super soldier serum, she thought in wonderment—and that extended to hands that dwarfed her own. The reinforced material of his gloves was warm and soft, and Jemma found herself suddenly overwhelmed by a swell of complicated emotions that boiled down to ‘home’ and ‘safe.’

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” he said genially, still grinning.

She flushed pink.

“Oh no,” she said, “pleasure’s all mine, believe me.”

She felt dizzy and disconnected. Quite discombobulated, in fact, and she imagined that it was possibly what a fizzy soda would feel like if it could.

Her soulmate. She was standing mere inches from her soulmate. Not only that, but unless the bombs had knocked her into some sort of coma, her soulmate was Steve Rogers. Tall, blond, muscular, strong enough to lift a car, infamously chivalrous, life story written in every history book since WWII, leader of the Avengers.

She was soulmates with Captain America.

When did the world start spinning?

Their hands still clasped together, he led her through the lobby to the elevator, and once inside and the lift began to rise, pulled down his cowl. To her pleasure and slight embarrassment, Jemma noted that he was even more handsome in person than in the news. In her rumpled and dirtied state, she felt quite out of place in the lift with him, and it was several floors of awkward silence before he broke it.

“So,” he said, “I’m not sure where we go from here.”

She played with the hem of her sleeve.

“Neither am I,” she admitted. “This isn’t exactly the opportune time for meeting your soulmate.”

It was odd to say and even odder to hear, but he didn’t seem to mind as he nodded his agreement.

“Bad timing is part of the gig. But we should probably wait until after this is resolved before discussing it,” he said.

“Of course,” she agreed. “I’m a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, you’re, uh, you’re an Avenger. We have to get used to our professional lives interfering with, well, us.”

It was difficult not to feel forward broaching the subject with a man she just met, but she supposed they’d have to do it sooner or later, and at least the conversation could only last as long as the elevator ride.

“I’m sure we’ll manage,” he said with a smile. After a moment, he added, “I’m Steve, by the way.”

She grinned. “Jemma.”

They both looked up as their floor lit up, and as the doors opened, it was a silent understanding that their conversation was on hold until the bombers were caught and the city could recover.

In the mean time, they were not Steve and Jemma, but Captain America and Agent Simmons, and they had jobs to do.


End file.
